After months of delays, the United Kingdom’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was finally published on June 30 to outline future spending.
It was not nearly enough, according to Defence Secretary John Healey, who resigned in protest at the offer of £15bn ($20bn) in additional spending over the next four years — about half the £28bn needed to cover what the military said was the bare minimum required.
All three services had something to complain about as requirements signed off in the government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) were ditched or delayed. But the plan for the Royal Navy (RN) was notably discouraging. Once termed Britain’s “greatest defence and ornament,” the navy now has fewer ships than America’s Coast Guard, and many vessels are laid up in port due to maintenance backlogs in an overworked naval infrastructure.
Unsurprisingly, the DIP preserves the RN’s primary function as the backbone of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, with over £63bn allocated to the Defence Nuclear Enterprise over the next four years. The DIP also solidified the UK’s commitment to the development of the Type 26 and Type 31 frigates, confirming the MoD’s plans to address the forthcoming frigate gap by ordering eight Type 26 ships and to increase the firepower of the five Type 31s by outfitting them with Mk 41 launchers and Norwegian Naval Strike Missiles.
But there was an unwelcome surprise buried in the plan. The planned Type 83 destroyer was scrapped entirely in favor of building six Common Combat Vessels (CCVs). These minimally-crewed ships will serve as the core of the RN’s new “hybrid navy” and act as command centers for drones which can be used to support air defense and reconnaissance.
The cancellation of the Type 83 in favor of the CCV is emblematic of many of the difficult realities faced by both the RN and the UK’s armed forces at large.
First, it demonstrates the significant cost constraints under which the MoD operates. Once a global military power, Britain has experienced both a massive contraction in defense spending and a significant diminishment of its defense capabilities since the end of the Cold War, with far too little money allocated to defense and far too much of those limited funds being spent on procurement programs that frequently arrive years late and over budget.
Major programs — like the renewal of the at-sea nuclear deterrent, nuclear-powered submarines and the Global Combat Air Programme jet, or GCAP, with Japan and Italy — will consume around half the equipment budget.
Each of these three represents ambitious programs appropriate to a global power. But is that really what Britain wants, especially if it cannot find the money to fund everything else, including its already diminished army?
The UK is on track to spend 2.5% of its GDP on defense, which is still only half of the 5% NATO countries have committed to spending by 2035, and around half of what it spent during the Cold War.
The RN receives little help from the DIP. Years of decreased funding resulted in struggles to keep Britain’s small and aging fleet at sea, with few of its 13 destroyers and frigates deployed and none of its five Astute-class attack submarines operational.
In light of these funding constraints and the fact that the Type 83s were projected to cost around £2.5bn apiece compared to an estimated £200m for each CCV, it is perhaps unsurprising to see the UK opt for the cheaper option. Rather than concentrating significant firepower and capital investments into fewer, larger ships, replacing the Type 45s with CCVs better distributes lethality across a greater number of vessels that can be built faster and cheaper.
But the UK has a reputation for over-promising and under-delivering on defense. Some analysts project that the £1.3bn allocated by the DIP to fund the hybrid navy will cover only one-fourth of the cost required to create a genuine hybrid fleet (much of the technology is not yet proven), while others have argued that “the total cost of the CCV and a fleet of Type 9Xs (drone warships) may ultimately end up being close to that of six Type 83s once all the development challenges are considered.”
These investments do illustrate the RN’s commitment to its strategic anti-submarine warfare initiative, Atlantic Bastion, which prioritizes the protection of critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) and countering Russian naval activity in the North Atlantic. It is described in the DIP as involving “an advanced hybrid naval force to defend the UK and NATO allies against evolving threats.”
On the other hand, the prioritization of drone warfare and uncrewed vessels over more proven, high-firepower ships such as destroyers might also say something else about the UK and its strategic horizon.
It can be seen as a sign of the RN’s declining focus on deployment beyond Europe. The Type 45 is an area air-defense warship designed to protect a carrier strike group using powerful sensors, battle management systems, and long-range missiles. Similarly, the Type 83 was envisioned as a highly advanced ship with robust offensive and defensive capabilities that could conduct long-range strikes (possibly even using hypersonic weapons) while also using its array of vertical missile launch cells and directed-energy weapons to provide robust air defense.
While the drones housed on CCVs can be used to support air defense and conduct strikes at shorter distances, it is hard to imagine these ships providing aircraft carriers with the same protection and support as a destroyer. With the Type 83’s cancellation, the RN is set to have no destroyers by 2040 as the Type 45s exit service.
Between this significant change in fleet composition and the RN’s growing focus on Atlantic defense, it is worth asking whether the UK increasingly views its navy as a patrol force for the North Atlantic that is increasingly focused on coastal defense.
While the RN once ruled the seas, its ability to project power beyond Europe has been significantly diminished. Despite occasionally deploying carrier strike groups to far-flung locations and performing well against the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Iran War laid bare the extent of the RN’s overstretch.
Britain had no warships in the Persian Gulf to contest Iran’s attempted closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and when Iranian proxies attacked Britain’s airbase in Cyprus, the RN had no destroyer nearby to provide air defense. Once the UK eventually deployed a single Type 45 to Cyprus, it took almost three weeks to arrive. Considering these struggles, it is little wonder CEPA assessed that, beyond protecting Britain’s nuclear deterrent and deploying a carrier strike group every 3-4 years, “the Royal Navy and Royal Marines only have the capability to support small-scale policing or counter-terrorism operations and patrol the UK and overseas territory coastal waters.”
Accordingly, one could argue that the RN’s apparent trend towards coastal defense is less of a dramatic reorientation than an honest assessment of its current capabilities.
While building the CCV over the Type 83 is a defensible decision, the fact that the UK apparently cannot invest in greater autonomous capabilities without eliminating proven assets like destroyers from its future fleet speaks to the broader harms of defense underinvestment.
Finally, the DIP is notable for the faith it seemingly puts in Britain’s maritime industrial base. Most of the RN’s near-future surface fleet, including its unmanned platforms, will be composed of vessels which have not been built and many which have yet to be designed. This constitutes a significant wager on the ability of the country’s maritime industrial base to efficiently design and construct these ships, despite British shipbuilding having long been plagued by delays and cost overruns.
Can Britain’s shipbuilding industry rise to meet this challenge?
Earlier this year, I traveled with colleagues from the Center for Maritime Strategy to the UK to research British seapower in preparation for the Center for Maritime Strategy’s report, Pier Review: Leveraging the Allied Maritime Industrial Base for U.S. Shipbuilding, which examined the maritime industrial strength of five American naval allies. As part of this project, I interviewed British defense officials and visited three shipyards (Govan, Rosyth, and Scotstoun) to assess the UK’s maritime and shipbuilding capabilities. Based on my prior research into the current state of the RN, I expected to be underwhelmed by my visit.
However, I left the UK encouraged by the seriousness with which the MoD and Britain’s maritime industrial base are treating the need to revive British seapower. The country’s naval officers and industry are more than serious about these efforts. The problems are very largely financial.
The UK’s National Shipbuilding Strategy established a 30-year shipbuilding pipeline to send a stable demand signal to the industry and support the recapitalization of the nation’s remaining shipyards, and the National Shipbuilding Office has adopted a sober and clear-minded approach to its implementation. While British manufacturing declined between 2019 and 2024, the country’s shipbuilding sector saw a 72% increase in its output during this same period, owing in large part to the country’s broad national effort to support it.
British shipyards are significantly investing in modernization, developing new infrastructure and processes to support the more efficient design and production of warships. British shipbuilders were already preparing to construct nearly 30 ships to support the RN prior to the release of the DIP, and the country’s maritime firms, BAE and Babcock, have successfully sold the designs of their Type 26 and Type 31 ships to allies and partners across the globe. As many as 12 nuclear attack submarines may be built in Britain under the AUKUS agreement.
A strong maritime industrial base is essential to sustaining any navy, and Britain has made important investments in this sector, which could help it better achieve the DIP’s shipbuilding priorities supported by a £26bn, decade-long naval-base improvement plan termed Project Royal Oak.
The DIP is not enough to restore the RN as a credible blue-water navy, but it may be a start. In the meantime, the navy and the industrial base that supports it have no choice but to find a way to use the resources allocated to them to maximize British naval power.
For an island nation such as the UK, maritime power is not a luxury — it is essential. Whether its navy will be properly funded to reflect that remains to be seen.
Matt Reisener is the Senior National Security Advisor for the Center for Maritime Strategy. He previously served as the National Democratic Institute’s Senior Program Manager for the Middle East and North Africa, managing international development programs in Yemen and Algeria. Before that, he worked at the Center for the National Interest from 2017-2021, where he was chief of staff. He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Rhetoric & Political Communication from William Jewell College.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
